Adam Lowy's Reviews > About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

This collection of essays is a fascinating and profoundly important read. The essays are from a number of people who describe their experiences of living with disabilities. These span a number of conditions and speak to various complications of living. Specific problems related to legal issues, relationships, occupational stressors are covered. One of the wonderful aspects of this book is how it spans, not just different conditions, but more importantly the challenges of defining oneself, advocating for oneself, living, in a world that all too quickly wants to define people with a simplistic term. I was left with the powerful empathetic experience of the individual, that is defined as disabled. (One passage from the book describes how we are all disabled, to be later disabled, and had been disabled.)
I am in the health care field, and for the past few years, I have felt that everyone involved in health care should read Andrew Solomon's classic work, Far from the Tree. This work is different and I think "pairs well" with Solomon's. Rather than the more in depth narratives of family member's struggles with challenged children, this work focuses on a number of different challenges- some concrete , some more abstract- from the individual's perspective. At first, I thought that all involved in health care should read this as well but actually, all of us should read it. We are all not only differently-abled ourselves, but in need of understanding of those labeled as such.

Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to review this ARC.